This disclosure is related to wide bandwidth farms for capturing ocean wave energy. More specifically this disclosure relates to maximizing the energy generated by ocean wave farm devices.
Proposed ocean energy device farms generally contain devices that are of the same size and have the same capacity. The devices are individually controlled to maximize the energy capture for each device. In the case of wave device farms, all devices are generally of the same design and the same size and are intended to capture energy from the same narrow bandwidth of wave frequencies even though the incident waves comprise of a wide range of frequencies. As a result, the energy in waves that lie outside of this selected frequency range are not captured efficiently resulting in a net energy capture that is significantly less than the maximum amount of energy that can potentially be captured.
It is therefore desirable to design ocean energy device farms that can simultaneously capture energy from a wide range of frequencies available in waves. In other words, it is desirable to have energy device farms comprising a number of devices that can simultaneously extract as much energy from incident waves at any given time. It may be necessary to have multiple types of devices for this purpose.